COMPARISON OF GIS AND GRAPHICS SOFTWARE FOR ADVANCED CARTOGRAPHIC SYMBOLIZATION AND LABELING: FIVE GIS PROJECTS Cynthia A. Brewer 1 and Charlie Frye 2 1 The Pennsylvania State University 2 ESRI, Inc. Remaining in the GIS environment during map production has many advantages but requires that an increasing range of cartographic effects and graphic design tools be embedded in the software. For example, cartographers want to position and curve type precisely; break lines for type over multicolor backgrounds with selective masking; clarify precise overpass, underpass, and merge relationships in complex road interchanges; control the way boundary lines interact as they intersect and overlay each other and hydrography; and design sophisticated mixtures of relief shading and hypsometric tints. The tools for accomplishing advanced cartographic effects are a mix of both analysis and representation tools. We challenged groups of students at the Pennsylvania State University with a series of compact design problems to be solved in both ESRI ArcGIS and Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. In this paper, we highlight some new and hard to find cartographic options in the GIS software. INTRODUCTION The five GIS projects we describe grew from a collaboration between the two authors, Cindy Brewer and Charlie Frye. We talked over challenging cartographic techniques that are possible in ArcGIS but not well known to cartographers (i.e., known to Charlie and not to Cindy). Charlie then prepared clipped data sets and rough instructions for each problem. Cindy ran through them with graduate students in her Cartography Seminar in the Fall semester of 2004 and with 15 undergraduate seniors in Applied Cartographic Design in the Spring of 2005 at Penn State. The graduate students got many of the bugs out of the instructions in the fall, and we presented this stage of the work at the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) conference in Portland, Maine, in October 2004. We extend our thanks to Tanuka Bhowmick, Steven Gardner, Adrienne Gruver, Tania del Mar López Marerro, Sohyun Park, Anthony Robinson, and Steven Weaver. In the Spring, We would like to acknowledge the hard work of students in the Spring 2005 class: Sean Ayers, Adrian Cox, William Gordon, James Griffin, Raya Guruswamy, Eric Harmon, Nathan Hautala, Adam Heyler, Nathaniel Howard, Martin Jarocki, Kevin Kulick, Christina Larwill, Robert Lavelle, Anthony Scardino, and Robert Wheland. Five GIS projects are described in this proceedings paper: Project 1: Multiple line overlays, including removal of lines along the coast. Project 2: Labels along a coast, including creating and curving annotation. Project 3: Making cartographic roads data, including advanced symbol-level drawing. Project 4: Advanced labels with Maplex and masking, including contour line manipulation. Project 5: High-end shaded relief, including multidirectional lighting and hypsometric tints. For each project, students received a project file, data and styles prepared to the point where a cartographic problem needed to be solved. They also received general instructions and a .pdf file showing the final result that could be accomplished. Each project description presents the core instructions from which students worked (note our use of active-voice wording directed to the students). Details such as particular file names, data sources, lists of deliverables, and due dates are omitted. Page limits preclude inclusion of the companion Illustrator/Photoshop projects from which students also worked. These instructions are intended to provide only the basic steps and many details are purposefully omitted to get the students exploring and thinking as they worked on the projects. We feel they learned well this way. The series of projects prepared students to complete varied mapping projects for clients of their choice during the last quarter of the semester. Our approach of not providing step-by-step instructions worked because Cindy and Matt met with the students in the computer lab for three 50-minute sessions a week and attendance was required for all sessions. Thus, students were working together on the projects and we could get them out of jams when they arose. The course was composed entirely of intensive, hands-on sessions. We hope you find these GIS projects useful for building your own advanced labs, but please be aware that there are both bugs and omitted steps in these instruction. They are not intended as stand-alone complete instructions; they are intended as in- person group activities. In the undergraduate course, students prepared 15 reports. They completed two-page reports on both ESRI ArcGIS and Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop for five projects. Each report had four components: a list of techniques learned, critique explaining an annoying but small problem, critique recommending fundamental structure change, and a print of the final map. After students had worked through project steps in each environment, they decided on the point in production when they had gained the benefits of the GIS analytical environment and it was time to export out of GIS and move to Illustrator/Photoshop. We described this as the “bail” decision (as in bailing out), and the bail report was the third report for each project. The bail decisions and critiques by the undergraduates are the focus of the ICC2005 conference presentation for which these five project descriptions serve as background information. PROJECT 1: MULTIPLE LINE OVERLAYS The A and B steps below present the bare bones of two ways to alter boundaries to mesh with coastlines and with other boundaries for cleaner cartography. Your goal is to produce a logical set of boundaries for the final map you print. Both state/province and international lines are removed along the coast and state lines are removed where they are coincident with international boundaries (Figure 1b). Before you start editing your file, get to know the layers (I got lost when I just started doing the steps). Look closely at the boundaries in the final .pdf and the starting project file. The two figures below show the final map reduced (Figure 1a) and an enlargement of a portion of the map (Figure 1b). a. b. Figure 1. Map examples for Project 1. a. Reduced version of the final map reproduced by students, showing the border region of northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada. b. An enlarged portion of the final goal. There are six boundary line styles: international across lake (1), along river (2), and on land (3); state/province on land (4) and along river (5); and coast (6). Think about what needs to be removed, repeated, cut apart, changed from polygons to lines, etc. For example, how many international boundary line types are on the map? Click each of the layers off and on to be sure you understand what each contains. There is already some redundancy between the layers. You will be adding more repeats and removing others. A. Select and Trace New Lines: Change country polygons to international border lines and coastlines (read this whole section including Hints before you start): 1. In ArcCatalog (ArcMap should not be open with one of these maps yet, because it will create a lock on the data), create a new line feature class called Borders in the “CustomAlbers” feature dataset within the .mdb. Change the geometry type to Line. Add a Short Integer field called “Type” for this feature class. 2. Start ArcMap with Proj1.mxd. 3. Add the “Borders” feature class to the project. 4. If the Editor toolbar is not already in your ArcMap window, add it. 5. Start Editing. 6. Select all features in the Countries 2002 layer (right click on the layer and choose SelectionSelect All). 7. Set the editing Target (to the Borders layer) and use the Trace tool to create a new feature. The trace tool is activated by selecting it from the menu that the sketch tool (pencil) is on. The Trace tool is the bottom right tool in this small menu (shaped like a polygon). 8. Start Tracing on a selected line by clicking where you want your new line to start (Hint: set up your snapping environment to ensure accuracy). Zoom in and set countries “visible off” (but still selected) so you can see your work. 9. Stop Tracing by clicking where you want to stop or where the line stops due at junction (press F2 or double- click). 10. Open the attributes dialog (on the Editor toolbar) to set the line Type to 0 or 1 or…how many line types? Hint: Look at the final .pdf (Figure 1b). 11. Repeat steps 6 to 10 until completed. Hints: a. You have to give the trace tool hints by moving the cursor in a useful direction—sometimes when you’re zoomed out too far that’s very hard. So zoom in while you’re tracing—the edit sketch environment remembers where your edit tools are while you pan and zoom. This is somewhat mysterious because it may be available but invisible. b. Experiment with Finish part and Sketch (right click when using the Sketch tool)…but not while tracing. c. Tracing, being geometrically intensive, is not the most stable function in the box; so save your edits after every couple of features. And save you project file periodically (mine was crashing as I figured this technique out). B. Convert Polygons to Lines and Selectively Remove Lines: Edit state polygons to create interior state borders: 1. Open the ArcToolbox from the Tools toolbar. Use the Polygon to Line tool in the Data Management Tools under Features to change the AdminSubUnits (state and province) polygons to lines. 2. Start Editing 3. Select by location (using the Selection menu) all the new AdminSubUnits lines, from Step 1, that share a line segment with Countries 2002. (You should be in a multi-option dialog box.) 4.